WILLIAM SCOTT RITTER, JR.: Well, I mean, the list is actually quite long over the years. But since November there-since November of 1997, I would say that there have been a half dozen or so inspections, which have been either delayed or postponed or canceled outright, due to pressure exerted on the executive chairman by the United States...
No, not just France Russia and Germany. China also was opposed. Only four of the fifteen members of the security council (US, UK, Bulgaria and Spain) supported the "second resolution" and military invasion. All the rest supported continued inspections. One didn't need to be bought off to oppose the war -- the war was a stupid idea, and anyone who didn't have an axe to grind could see that.
...and that $8.8bn doesn't include money looted, stolen, embezzled, and ripped off from other sources, such as money that was found in Saddam's palaces, etc.
In my opinion, the Iraq war was/is the biggest armed robbery in history.
The above are not mutually exclusive. Modula-2 has:
1. The power of assembler.
2. The speed to at least match C.
3. Greater grammatical simplicity than C.
4. Better memory management than C.
5. Much better security than C or C++.
I think the only things that kept Modula-2 from taking over the world were (a) not a rich enough standard library, and (b) keywords in upper case (annoying to type, and ugly on the screen), and maybe the fact that it was from Switzerland.
Although Modula-2 has faded into proglgang history, Delphi is heavily based on it, and other languages are influenced by it.
I hope D becomes big, because it has all the features you describe, which I agree are desirable. It also has syntax that is very similar to C and C++, and is compatible with C libraries, so the majority of working programmers will find it easy to transfer their skills to D. The simple grammar and module system of D, plus the fact that it has such things as hash-maps natively built into the language, mean that D could become the language of choice for all applications, wherever it is available (replacing even scripting languages).
What apple really understand is how to use a huge marketing budget well. Over the years since the iPod came out, they've made sure they got the maximum press publicity, amounting to many thousands of mentions; they've made sure that lots of cool people have been seen in public wearing iPods, in pop videos, TV appearances and elsewhere; and they've run a huge, award-winning advertising campaign ("silhouette"), that is probably one of the most recognizable of recent times. Fair play to them. Nothing wrong with running a good marketing campaign.
Most of Apple's rivals, such as Creative, iRiver and Rio are relatively small companies that don't have the budget for that kind of thing. Some of them don't understand cool: the styling of the iRiver products is based on traditional electronic gizmo styling, and compared to an iPod looks very uncool (but they're good on features). On the other hand, I think Creative do understand cool, and so do new entrants Neuros. This can be seen in the efforts they've put into the styling of their latest products. However, a large percentage of cool comes from the buzz you can create around your product, and nothing to do with the physical product itself. In that event, a small company that understands cool is always at a disadvantage against a big company that understands cool.
Sony is a big company that understands cool. The big problem for them is that their record company arm doesn't want their gadget arm to support MP3. After a struggle, it seems the gadget arm has won, and they've just released their first MP3-compatible HD player. There's a rather negative review by someone called "mavis" on the web, but most of the reviews on Amazon UK, where the product has been sold for a couple of weeks now, are very positive. It comes on sale in the US in February, so by late Spring, we'll be sure to know if Sony have created an "iPod killer". (Realistically, the word "killer" is inappropriate, since people like Sony and Creative are competing for a share of a growing market, not to destroy the iPod.)
Toshiba is another big company that understands cool. They have a product the could probably challenge Apple (the Gigabeat) on features and style, but they seem to have done a deal whereby they only sell it in Japan. (Toshiba make hard disks for the iPod, so it makes sense).
http://www.neurosaudio.com/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/12/preview_to sh_giga_60gb/ http://products.sony.co.uk/sony_nw-dh3.asp
iPod, cool, sure, iPos Mini, cool, fine, but the macMini, cool? You gotta be kidding! It's a box! What's cool about a box? It's a cheap desktop computer that you're supposed to use with a left-over monitor! What's cool about that?
If they think that people are buying iPods so that they can download music from the ITMS, they still don't get it. People don't buy a music player because of the options that are available to buy music online, they (usually) already have gigabytes of music on their hard disks & want to listen to it on the go.
Of course they don't think people are buying iPods to download form ITMS. They've been in this market for longer than Apple. They know the score. That's why their machines don't lock you into an ITMS or to proprietary audio formats (which is how Sony messed up with their NW-HD1 -- an error recently corrected with the new HD3).
Make it look great, make it easy to use, and people will buy it. Simple as that, Creative...
You don't need to tell them that, either. In case you haven't noticed, their latest models look a lot more like iPods than their earlier models, and they've got this "touch" interface, which is clearly inspired by the iPod wheel, without being a direct imitation.
The iPod is more popular because it was the first out of the gate
It is Apple's success in marketing that has led people like you to think it was first out of the gate.
It was not first out of the gate, and Creative is one of the companies that was making HD players before Apple.
Look at this news story from 2001, when the iPod was first launched:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/10/23/apple_pops _ipod/
TheRegister speaks thus:
In answer to our previous question, Apple's so-called "breakthrough digital device" is called the iPod, but as we feared, it also proves to be a 'me too' product.
Designed with Apple's usual flair, iPod is ultimately nothing more than an MP3 player with a built-in hard drive, little different from Creative Labs' Nomad Jukebox.
Apart from its looks - cannily styled to tie in with the popular iBook's glossy white - iPod offers close integration with Apple's MP3 software, iTunes (version 2, coming soon), and provides a 1394 connection rather than the usual USB link, which doubles up as the unit's power supply, feeding its Lithium Polymer battery with electricity from the host Mac's FireWire bus or via the 1394-enable mains adaptor.
The hard drive is an unspectacular 5GB, and the price a whopping $399 - £329 in the UK. However, the drive can be used as a removable hard disk and is capable of holding a 1000 songs at MP3's 160Kbps compression rate. There's enough RAM in the device for 20 minutes of non-skip playback, Apple claims. The battery lasts for ten hours between charges.
By comparison, the Nomad Jukebox contains a 6GB hard drive and costs around $220. It weighs 14oz (the iPod comes in at 6.5), doesn't look as good, isn't as compact and takes longer to grab tracks, but who cares when it's not much more than half the price?
Well, if it works for Sony, it could just work for Apple. Sony's products are generally more expensive than rival items, but the Japanese giant makes sales on the strength of its brand and the quality of its goods. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has long said he wants his company to be more like Sony, and iPod the latest step in a strategy that takes in the iBook and Apple's retail stores-cum-showrooms.
Jobs' plan isn't dissimilar to ex-CEO Gil Amelio's scheme to pitch Apple as the Maglite of the computer biz - in other words, offering the same products, but with more flair, better design, higher quality and (more importantly) a weightier price tag. All we have to do now is see whether consumers consider Apple in the same light as Sony/Maglite and spend all that the extra cash for a logo.
I think that pretty much sums it up.
I guess since I'm replying to an inaccurate post that was moderated 5 for insight, my corrective will have to be moderated 10.
I understand what you're getting at, but you're demanding a change in terminology that really isn't necessary. Of course man is part of nature, and for an animal like a domestic dog, man's activities are part of the environment, but in another, different sense, nature is the opposite of art, i.e., everything that is not artificial is natural, and everything that is not natural is artificial. If you remember that there are these two senses of nature (one that encompases man and man's arts, and one that exists in contrast to them), then the problem of terminology disappears like a puff of smoke, and it becomes obvious why we speak of "artifical breeding" on the one hand, and "natural selection" on the other.
I was just commenting generally, and I have no intention of getting into a debate on this. If you want to understand why Young Earth Creationism is nonsense, go to talkorigins.org.
I think it would be very hard to kill off humanity, even if we tried. Our numbers and our spread are the reason. It is difficult to think of a scenario in which everyone from Siberia to Trinidad, from Tibet to Cape Town, and from Chile to Nova Scotia is killed off, without at least a few surviving somewhere.
Okay, I've read this whole thread now, and the scientific ignorance, prejudice and distortion have left me stunned. I'd have thought the slashdot community would be more open to science than this, but I suppose the popularity of creationism in the USA has created a kind of mass blindness. Anyone who looked at the evidence with an open mind would see that all the sciences together -- from nuclear physics to astronomy to geology to genetics -- provide overwhelming evidence that (a) the earth and the universe are very old, and (b) species evolved along Darwinian lines. To think otherwise is just plumb crazy. Unfortunately, America seems to be in the grip of some kind of cult that makes half its people insist on believing something that is utterly incredible. Which is more likely, really, that ALL of science is wrong, or that a story written by ignorant desert people three thousand years ago might not be 100% literally true?
To suggest that the researchers are too stupid to distinguish between the skeleton of a child and that of a small adult is incredible. Anyway, the skeletons are clearly not those of Homo Sapiens. Look at the pictures of the complete skull.
And I'm saying that the distinction between natural and artificial selection is specious.
I say the distinction is not specious at all. Darwin was moved to contemplate natural selection as an idea after observing the results of artificial selection on pigeons. Artificially bred pigeons vary hugely, like dogs. The same goes for many other species that are bred by human beings, such as laboratory and farm animals and plants. Artificial selection can put breeding pressure on animals that would never occur in nature, and cause much, much faster changes, and yield varieties that would never survive on their own, without the continued intervention of humans.
You could reasonably say that artificial selection is a special case of natural selection, but even so, it is quite different from selection that doesn't involve an intelligent breeder with a purpose. You'd need a new term to distinguish between the selection that comes from non-purposive pressures of the environment on the one hand, and artificial selection on the other. You would also be using the term "natural selection" in a way different from Darwin's original intention. Darwin, having observed the effects of artificial selection, considered that
similar, analogous
processes would probably occur in nature, without a teleological factor. It was this process that he called "natural selection". Therefore, according to Darwin, natural selection and artificial selection are different things.
Nutrition alone couldn't do it. There are limits. For instance, for Homo Sapiens, you won't find any groups that have an average height below 5 ft, except African Pygmies, who are smaller because of their genes.
Politicians are motivated by self-interest, but not self-interest alone. The same is true of everyone else. Business-people, professionals, workers, the idle rich and the idle poor, are all motivated by self-interest to a large degree but not entirely. Journalists, too. Most of our systems, capitalism especially, are predicated on the generalizing assumption that everyone is motivated by rational self-interest. When thinking about politicians and self-interest, think about Old Labour and Michael Foot. Michael Foot's 1983 manifesto was famously described as "the longest suicide note in history". Was that manifesto a product of pure self-interest?
I can gurantee that (s)he'll carefully listen to what you have to say, spin alot of words which can be interpreted as agreement and yet still fundamentally disagree.
That's because your "elected representative" is not elected to agree with you (or any particular voter), and has a right to his or her own opinions. Their disagreement with you may or may not have anything to do with self-interest. It may have to do with what they believe is true, or with their loyalty to a particular party or set of ideas.
The rest of your comment doesn't merit a response.
Only because you don't have a response to it. You know it is true.
I can't let you get away with that. You're assuming Kennedy is lying, and then, on the basis of that assumption, opting to be sickened by his dishonesty. That's ridiculous. If you actually caught him in a lie, you'd have an excuse to be sickened, but you haven't.
In any case, your assumption is unfounded. Not committing troops to Iraq need not have threatened Britain's basic relationship with the US. When the Bush Administration discovered that it was politically difficult for Blair to commit troops, they made it clear that they would be okay if Britain did not do so. The US has several close allies who either did not commit toops, or provided only nominal, non-combat support. Anyway, Britain's relationship with the US is not invariably warm. It was quite frosty when John Major was PM, and has been at other times before that. Even during Blair's government, there have been sharp disagreements between the UK and the US (the Banana Wars, the Steel tarrif dispute, and so on), so even if Kennedy did manage to upset the US, it would be nothing remarkable or unprecedented.
Finally, let's get over this nonsense that politicians are uniquely dishonest. They are not. They are constantly under the spotlight and under pressure to justify themselves -- much more so than most people in most professions, yet they know that if they're caught in any serious lie (and often in a non-serious one), their career will be harmed, or perhaps even destroyed. Therefore, they are more careful than many professions to avoid lying. Compared to plumbers and builders, who cavalierly break promises every day, politicians are as pure as fresh snow. Compared artists and entertainment people, who constantly lie about their background, their personal lives, and their motivations, and their opinions, politicians are paragons of truth. to business managers, who spin in different directions according to whether they're addressing employees, the tax man, shareholders, or the general public, they are spotless. Compared to practically any kind of salesperson, they are saints. Even compared to computer people, they're they're not bad (considering how often software engineers and network administrators give conveniently misleading estimates of tasks). The difference between politicians and the rest of us is not in how much inclined they are to lie, but in how often they are publicly put on the spot (ironically, by journalists, who are particularly prone to lying, and get away with it often).
The same goes for your idea that politicians are only ever driven by pure self-interest. If they were, they would have closed ranks by now, and we would all now be living in one-party states.
It stood on the successes of C and C++ and closed up language holes by providing a better class/inheritance/object representation.
I disagree. I think Java is worse than C++ in more ways than it is better. To improve on C++ would have been (a) to make pointers more type-safe, but still keep pointers, (b) to make operator overloading more disciplined, but still keep operator overloading, (c) to place a few restrictions on multiple inheritance, but not replace it with something as extremely restricted as the interfaces mechanism, (d) to replace "for(x;y;z)" with "for x in range y by z", and (e) to make memory management easy for the user by implementing it within the collections library, rather than by imposing garbage collection on everyone. Garbage collection is less flexible than are smart pointers, and makes Java useless for real-time work. Also, destructors should have been retained -- getting rid of them was a major mistake. Destructors are not only for clearing up memory. Refusing to implement generics for many years was a serious mistake as well. Generic programming is, if anything, more powerful than object-oriented programming. Now they have implemented it, but in a way that carries a run-time cost, so they've lost some of the benefits of generic programming. Also, they've implemented it as a bolt-on, as it is in C++, so the syntax is messy, as it is in C++. If they had implemented it from the first, they could have made it very clean and simple. The int/Integer and other non-object/object pairs, with the clunky conversion between them, are a bad thing, too. The collections and algorithms library is very poor compared to STL and Boost. The way they dealt with branches based on boolean types was wrong as well. Branches (if, while, for, etc.) should not be based on the boolean type, but on zero/non-zero (except "for"). I know they were trying to solve the problem caused by ==/= confusion, but they chose the wrong approach. They failed to implement many good new ideas from recent computer science, so, for instance, didn't provide an easy way to turn two values into a range. "For" loops should have been based on a range type, not the zero test inherited from C. Java could have supported functional programming, but it doesn't.
Finally, and most important of all, Java has committed suicide on the desktop by refusing to licence the implementation of Java-to-native compilers.
Not all politicians are liars. In general, good politicians are very careful not to tell lies, except about their own states of mind ("I wholeheartedly support this policy", etc.). It is just not worth lying, since the cost of being caught is too great. When journalists try to trap politicians into either lying or admitting an unsavoury truth, competent politicians always duck, usually by giving an uninformative or irrelevant answer, or by falling back on slogans and platitudes.
The nearest thing most politicians come to lying is spinning -- putting a positive gloss on bad things, hyping up good things beyond their importance, and so on.
Blair, however, is different. His reputation for spin before Iraq was legendary. He stretched and refined spin until it was indistinguishable from lying, and he indulged in it endlessly. Despite that he was often caught, he still succeeded in achieving most of his aims for each act of spin. What helped him a lot was that he was and is one of those lucky people who can fake sincerity almost perfectly. Those who are not taken in by Blair's methods know that the more earnest Blair sounds and looks, the more likely it is that he is insincere. It was with great earnestness that Blair succeeded in winning the indulgence of Parliament and the British public. People thought, as Blair burst yet another blood vessel in that earnestly beating heart of his, "He seems so sincere, perhaps he really does have convincing evidence that he can't reveal to us for security reasons. Maybe we should give him the benefit of the doubt."
Blair should never have been given the benefit of the doubt. By spinning a web that has trapped Britain in a needless war, and then by (for the sake of his own ego) refusing to back out, he has excelled in evil.
Here's where Blair has gone wrong: he still thinks he's only lying about his state of mind ("I firmly believe that I am right", "I didn't know at the time", etc.), but everyone (about 85% of the UK electorate) can see that if his state of mind is and was as he claims, then he is an insane idiot, and that (since he is neither quite that stupid nor quite that mad) these are obviously legalistic evasions of the fact that he did lie when he was presenting evidence of WMDs, etc., to parliament. It is precisely because Blair lied to Parliament that he was able to get a majority to vote for the war. Without the lies (and other manipulations), he could never have achieved that majority. Let's not forget that he came close to losing a vote of confidence over this issue. If Blair had not succeeded in hoodwinking his fellow parliamentarians, he would no longer be PM today.
I don't think Kennedy would have gone to war against Iraq. Why would he? It would not be in Britain's interest, it would not be pro-European, and it would not be in line with general Lib Dem thinking. Several top members of the Labour cabinet would also not have gone to war in Iraq, and some of them said so. Nor would some prominent Tories (on the respectably Tory grounds that Britian's interest would not be furthered by doing so), and they also said so. It was Ian Duncan Smith who insisted that the Tories support Blair's call to arms. So, if there were people who were not only opposed to the war in the Labour and Tory camps, some to the extent that they were willing to risk their careers in their opposition, why would a Lib Dem politician not oppose the war with equal seriousness?
It is regrettable that the move to impeach Blair has got nowhere. That is due to the gutlessness of too many MPs. It is regrettable that he was not judged by an independent tribunal instead of one (the Hutton inquiry) in which he was able to set the terms. Had the correct charges been laid, he would certainly have been found guilty.
Since those with the formal power to do so lack the guts to get rid of Blair, I'm left hoping that illness or something forces him to retire from office early.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what Scott Ritter was saying in 1998:
WILLIAM SCOTT RITTER, JR.: Well, I mean, the list is actually quite long over the years. But since November there-since November of 1997, I would say that there have been a half dozen or so inspections, which have been either delayed or postponed or canceled outright, due to pressure exerted on the executive chairman by the United States...
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/july-de c98/ritter_8-31.html
That's right, it was the US, not Saddam, who was preventing the proper completion of the weapons inspection process.
The same thing happened again in 2003. It was Bush, not Saddam, who forced Hans Blix and Unscom to leave Iraq.
No, not just France Russia and Germany. China also was opposed. Only four of the fifteen members of the security council (US, UK, Bulgaria and Spain) supported the "second resolution" and military invasion. All the rest supported continued inspections. One didn't need to be bought off to oppose the war -- the war was a stupid idea, and anyone who didn't have an axe to grind could see that.
In my opinion, the Iraq war was/is the biggest armed robbery in history.
The BBC's File On 4 programme has learnt that out of over $20bn raised in oil revenues during US-led rule, the use of $8.8bn is unaccounted for...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/file_on_4/42 16853.stm
A transcript of the documentary is available.
I think the only things that kept Modula-2 from taking over the world were (a) not a rich enough standard library, and (b) keywords in upper case (annoying to type, and ugly on the screen), and maybe the fact that it was from Switzerland.
Although Modula-2 has faded into proglgang history, Delphi is heavily based on it, and other languages are influenced by it.
I hope D becomes big, because it has all the features you describe, which I agree are desirable. It also has syntax that is very similar to C and C++, and is compatible with C libraries, so the majority of working programmers will find it easy to transfer their skills to D. The simple grammar and module system of D, plus the fact that it has such things as hash-maps natively built into the language, mean that D could become the language of choice for all applications, wherever it is available (replacing even scripting languages).
About D: http://www.digitalmars.com/d/index.html
Why should dance change? If people aren't unhappy with it, there's no problem if it stays the same, surely?
What apple really understand is how to use a huge marketing budget well. Over the years since the iPod came out, they've made sure they got the maximum press publicity, amounting to many thousands of mentions; they've made sure that lots of cool people have been seen in public wearing iPods, in pop videos, TV appearances and elsewhere; and they've run a huge, award-winning advertising campaign ("silhouette"), that is probably one of the most recognizable of recent times. Fair play to them. Nothing wrong with running a good marketing campaign.o sh_giga_60gb/
Most of Apple's rivals, such as Creative, iRiver and Rio are relatively small companies that don't have the budget for that kind of thing. Some of them don't understand cool: the styling of the iRiver products is based on traditional electronic gizmo styling, and compared to an iPod looks very uncool (but they're good on features). On the other hand, I think Creative do understand cool, and so do new entrants Neuros. This can be seen in the efforts they've put into the styling of their latest products. However, a large percentage of cool comes from the buzz you can create around your product, and nothing to do with the physical product itself. In that event, a small company that understands cool is always at a disadvantage against a big company that understands cool.
Sony is a big company that understands cool. The big problem for them is that their record company arm doesn't want their gadget arm to support MP3. After a struggle, it seems the gadget arm has won, and they've just released their first MP3-compatible HD player. There's a rather negative review by someone called "mavis" on the web, but most of the reviews on Amazon UK, where the product has been sold for a couple of weeks now, are very positive. It comes on sale in the US in February, so by late Spring, we'll be sure to know if Sony have created an "iPod killer". (Realistically, the word "killer" is inappropriate, since people like Sony and Creative are competing for a share of a growing market, not to destroy the iPod.)
Toshiba is another big company that understands cool. They have a product the could probably challenge Apple (the Gigabeat) on features and style, but they seem to have done a deal whereby they only sell it in Japan. (Toshiba make hard disks for the iPod, so it makes sense).
http://www.neurosaudio.com/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/12/preview_t
http://products.sony.co.uk/sony_nw-dh3.asp
iPod, cool, sure, iPos Mini, cool, fine, but the macMini, cool? You gotta be kidding! It's a box! What's cool about a box? It's a cheap desktop computer that you're supposed to use with a left-over monitor! What's cool about that?
Of course they don't think people are buying iPods to download form ITMS. They've been in this market for longer than Apple. They know the score. That's why their machines don't lock you into an ITMS or to proprietary audio formats (which is how Sony messed up with their NW-HD1 -- an error recently corrected with the new HD3).
You don't need to tell them that, either. In case you haven't noticed, their latest models look a lot more like iPods than their earlier models, and they've got this "touch" interface, which is clearly inspired by the iPod wheel, without being a direct imitation.
I understand what you're getting at, but you're demanding a change in terminology that really isn't necessary. Of course man is part of nature, and for an animal like a domestic dog, man's activities are part of the environment, but in another, different sense, nature is the opposite of art, i.e., everything that is not artificial is natural, and everything that is not natural is artificial. If you remember that there are these two senses of nature (one that encompases man and man's arts, and one that exists in contrast to them), then the problem of terminology disappears like a puff of smoke, and it becomes obvious why we speak of "artifical breeding" on the one hand, and "natural selection" on the other.
I was just commenting generally, and I have no intention of getting into a debate on this. If you want to understand why Young Earth Creationism is nonsense, go to talkorigins.org.
I think it would be very hard to kill off humanity, even if we tried. Our numbers and our spread are the reason. It is difficult to think of a scenario in which everyone from Siberia to Trinidad, from Tibet to Cape Town, and from Chile to Nova Scotia is killed off, without at least a few surviving somewhere.
Okay, I've read this whole thread now, and the scientific ignorance, prejudice and distortion have left me stunned. I'd have thought the slashdot community would be more open to science than this, but I suppose the popularity of creationism in the USA has created a kind of mass blindness. Anyone who looked at the evidence with an open mind would see that all the sciences together -- from nuclear physics to astronomy to geology to genetics -- provide overwhelming evidence that (a) the earth and the universe are very old, and (b) species evolved along Darwinian lines. To think otherwise is just plumb crazy. Unfortunately, America seems to be in the grip of some kind of cult that makes half its people insist on believing something that is utterly incredible. Which is more likely, really, that ALL of science is wrong, or that a story written by ignorant desert people three thousand years ago might not be 100% literally true?
To suggest that the researchers are too stupid to distinguish between the skeleton of a child and that of a small adult is incredible. Anyway, the skeletons are clearly not those of Homo Sapiens. Look at the pictures of the complete skull.
The Japanese have been getting taller over the years, and are no longer all that diminutive. There are plenty of other people who are shorter.
I'm waiting for them to find fossils of mammoth dwarves.
Nutrition alone couldn't do it. There are limits. For instance, for Homo Sapiens, you won't find any groups that have an average height below 5 ft, except African Pygmies, who are smaller because of their genes.
There is a science known as cladistics which tells us when it is reasonable to call something a new species or not. It's not random.
I can gurantee that (s)he'll carefully listen to what you have to say, spin alot of words which can be interpreted as agreement and yet still fundamentally disagree.
That's because your "elected representative" is not elected to agree with you (or any particular voter), and has a right to his or her own opinions. Their disagreement with you may or may not have anything to do with self-interest. It may have to do with what they believe is true, or with their loyalty to a particular party or set of ideas.
The rest of your comment doesn't merit a response.
Only because you don't have a response to it. You know it is true.
In any case, your assumption is unfounded. Not committing troops to Iraq need not have threatened Britain's basic relationship with the US. When the Bush Administration discovered that it was politically difficult for Blair to commit troops, they made it clear that they would be okay if Britain did not do so. The US has several close allies who either did not commit toops, or provided only nominal, non-combat support. Anyway, Britain's relationship with the US is not invariably warm. It was quite frosty when John Major was PM, and has been at other times before that. Even during Blair's government, there have been sharp disagreements between the UK and the US (the Banana Wars, the Steel tarrif dispute, and so on), so even if Kennedy did manage to upset the US, it would be nothing remarkable or unprecedented.
Finally, let's get over this nonsense that politicians are uniquely dishonest. They are not. They are constantly under the spotlight and under pressure to justify themselves -- much more so than most people in most professions, yet they know that if they're caught in any serious lie (and often in a non-serious one), their career will be harmed, or perhaps even destroyed. Therefore, they are more careful than many professions to avoid lying. Compared to plumbers and builders, who cavalierly break promises every day, politicians are as pure as fresh snow. Compared artists and entertainment people, who constantly lie about their background, their personal lives, and their motivations, and their opinions, politicians are paragons of truth. to business managers, who spin in different directions according to whether they're addressing employees, the tax man, shareholders, or the general public, they are spotless. Compared to practically any kind of salesperson, they are saints. Even compared to computer people, they're they're not bad (considering how often software engineers and network administrators give conveniently misleading estimates of tasks). The difference between politicians and the rest of us is not in how much inclined they are to lie, but in how often they are publicly put on the spot (ironically, by journalists, who are particularly prone to lying, and get away with it often).
The same goes for your idea that politicians are only ever driven by pure self-interest. If they were, they would have closed ranks by now, and we would all now be living in one-party states.
Finally, and most important of all, Java has committed suicide on the desktop by refusing to licence the implementation of Java-to-native compilers.
The nearest thing most politicians come to lying is spinning -- putting a positive gloss on bad things, hyping up good things beyond their importance, and so on.
Blair, however, is different. His reputation for spin before Iraq was legendary. He stretched and refined spin until it was indistinguishable from lying, and he indulged in it endlessly. Despite that he was often caught, he still succeeded in achieving most of his aims for each act of spin. What helped him a lot was that he was and is one of those lucky people who can fake sincerity almost perfectly. Those who are not taken in by Blair's methods know that the more earnest Blair sounds and looks, the more likely it is that he is insincere. It was with great earnestness that Blair succeeded in winning the indulgence of Parliament and the British public. People thought, as Blair burst yet another blood vessel in that earnestly beating heart of his, "He seems so sincere, perhaps he really does have convincing evidence that he can't reveal to us for security reasons. Maybe we should give him the benefit of the doubt."
Blair should never have been given the benefit of the doubt. By spinning a web that has trapped Britain in a needless war, and then by (for the sake of his own ego) refusing to back out, he has excelled in evil.
Here's where Blair has gone wrong: he still thinks he's only lying about his state of mind ("I firmly believe that I am right", "I didn't know at the time", etc.), but everyone (about 85% of the UK electorate) can see that if his state of mind is and was as he claims, then he is an insane idiot, and that (since he is neither quite that stupid nor quite that mad) these are obviously legalistic evasions of the fact that he did lie when he was presenting evidence of WMDs, etc., to parliament. It is precisely because Blair lied to Parliament that he was able to get a majority to vote for the war. Without the lies (and other manipulations), he could never have achieved that majority. Let's not forget that he came close to losing a vote of confidence over this issue. If Blair had not succeeded in hoodwinking his fellow parliamentarians, he would no longer be PM today.
I don't think Kennedy would have gone to war against Iraq. Why would he? It would not be in Britain's interest, it would not be pro-European, and it would not be in line with general Lib Dem thinking. Several top members of the Labour cabinet would also not have gone to war in Iraq, and some of them said so. Nor would some prominent Tories (on the respectably Tory grounds that Britian's interest would not be furthered by doing so), and they also said so. It was Ian Duncan Smith who insisted that the Tories support Blair's call to arms. So, if there were people who were not only opposed to the war in the Labour and Tory camps, some to the extent that they were willing to risk their careers in their opposition, why would a Lib Dem politician not oppose the war with equal seriousness?
It is regrettable that the move to impeach Blair has got nowhere. That is due to the gutlessness of too many MPs. It is regrettable that he was not judged by an independent tribunal instead of one (the Hutton inquiry) in which he was able to set the terms. Had the correct charges been laid, he would certainly have been found guilty.
Since those with the formal power to do so lack the guts to get rid of Blair, I'm left hoping that illness or something forces him to retire from office early.